Review of David Turnbull’s
Masons, Tricksters, and Cartographers: Comparative Studies in the Sociology
of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge. Published in Science as Culture,
pp. 129-134, 12:1, 2003.

For those of us who have struggled to have non-western knowledge systems recognized
as a legitimate topic in Science and Technology Studies, Turnbull’s
Masons, Tricksters, and Cartographers is a exciting demonstration for the
viability of these interdisciplinary hybrids. But the text is far more than
just vindication for indigenous technoscience, as Turnbull’s reason
for juxtaposing these more traditional anthropological case studies with their
complimentary western STS examples is to map out a path to Enrique Dussel’s
new category, the “transmodern.” In Turnbull’s account,
modernist and postmodernist frameworks both have failings which render them
inadequate to the task of guiding us to a “technoscience that does not
dominate nature but is compatible with it, that does not exploit and demean
people but enhances their lives” (pg. 3). Moreover he finds these failings
are complimentary; we simultaneously need the advantages of both— “the
joint preservation of the liberatory elements of the enlightenment project
and a wide diversity of other knowledge traditions” (pg 14).

Turnbull’s path to the transmodern
is similarly complimentary in structure. He has two primary goals: to show
that putative local knowledge is more mobile than we commonly assume, and
to show that putative universal knowledge is more local than we commonly assume.
The main mechanism for both demonstrations is the “assemblage”
– a term he equates with “Foucault’s epistemes, Kuhn’s
paradigms, Callon, Law and Latour’s actor-networks, Hacking self-vindicating
constellations, Fujimora and Star’s… boundary objects and Knorr-Cetina’s
reconfigurations” (pg 44). Though a bit all-encompassing for someone
who champions the partial and incomplete, Turnbull’s use of assemblage
works well throughout the book, showing how the local assemblage of indigenous
knowledge allows it a surprising (technoscience-like) mobility, and how revealing
the truth of western technoscience’s assemblage behind its façade
of universalism illuminates its parochial limitations.

Turnbull’s first chapter
beautifully illustrates this concept of mobility, showing, for example, how
the Inca’s knotted string record, the quipu, served as a visual analogue
for their network of geographic markers, and vice-versa. Another striking
visual comparison is generated for Australian Yolgnu kinship systems and their
geographic mapping. I was disappointed that his account of the mathematics
in Yolgnu kinship was merely in comparison to western counting, which is a
trivial case of recursion in comparison to the more complex binary recursion
of the Yolgnu (a better comparison would be pseudorandom number generation
using addition modulo 2).

The next chapter reviews the architectural
controversy over Gothic cathedrals: evidence suggests that they were created
by several teams over many years without any single master plan, but many
experts say that is surely wrong – anything design so complex and effective
must be the product of top-down organization from a single master architect
and his unitary vision. Turnbull brilliantly exploits this skepticism of architectural
historians as an analogy to skepticism over the assemblage: surely science
must be based on universal laws, not mere local assemblies? Here he finds
the opportunity to show some detail on how an assemblage can produce such
robust outcomes (the Charters Cathedral is 345 feet high, and has stood for
800 years) with such localized tools. The tools themselves are not as local
as we thought: templates, for example, can be moved through time and space,
and serve as material manifestations of the ratios and proportions required
for successful coordination of construction.

I found Turnbull’s chapter
on cartography somewhat less convincing. He begins with the book’s cover
illustration: the intriguing “Fools Cap” map of 1590, a geographic
sketch of the world appearing as the face in a court jester’s costume.
Turnbull delves deeply into the origin of the term “motley,” originally
referring to the jester’s costume, and accurately describing the heterogeneous
assemblage of local practice, specialized tools, social networks and empirical
observation that lead to the development of modern mapping science. All well
and good. The chapter does indeed undermine the claim
for a seamless, unitary cartographic revolution; it makes a fool of the myth
of cartography’s birth through the discovery of universal scientific
laws. Beneath this façade Turnbull reveals the trickster of assemblage—the
messy hybrid of local knowledge mobilized by technosocial networks. But in
this historic comparison of the co-evolution between science, navigation and
maps between various European cultures—Portugal, France, Spain, England,
and Germany—it becomes clear that some assemblages work better than
others. I came away with the distinct impression that it was the least assemblage-like
efforts—those with the most standardized quantitative rules, the most
centralized control, and the least heterogeneity—that worked best (e.g.
the triumph of the French survey culminating in the Carte de Cassini).

Whether this was a flaw in Turnbull’s
theory of assemblage or merely my own misreading, the chapter on indigenous
navigation in the Pacific brilliantly recovers his thesis by providing a profound
counter-example: a global positioning system that works without maps. In contrast
to the dismissal of Pacific navigation as mere “dead reckoning”
in less thoughtful accounts, Turnbull provides strong evidence for the ways
in which Pacific island navigation allows for the integration of an indigenous
star compass, heterogeneous sensory inputs (e.g. gauging travel speed from
the sound of waves against the hull) and, most importantly, the etak system
in which the navigator “conceives his canoe to be stationary and the
reference island as moving backwards against the backdrop of rising and setting
points of the stars” (pg 139). I was struck by the similarities to satellite
GPS, which also works by measuring ego-centered relativistic shift rather
than specifying a location on a map.

The account of malaria vaccine
research is also quite convincing. Rather than the scholastic debates of historians
in architecture or cartography, malaria involves high-stakes finances, international
politics and the global biotech industry. And while the messiness of 13th
century cathedral construction and map-making is easy to dismiss as ancestral
error, its much more difficult to reconcile assumptions for 21st century scientific
supremacy with Turnbull’s motley assemblage of malaria. Even the professional
malariologists find themselves taking constructivist positions. Vaccines that
work in one location do nothing in another, and the factors that govern the
manifestations of the disease include differences between parasites, different
mosquito vectors, genetic variation among human hosts, and local conditions
as subtle as dog ownership (which apparently offers the mosquito a preferred
alternative target to humans during sleep). Like other disasters caused by
over-zealous first world development programs (international use of pesticides,
nuclear proliferation, failures of the green revolution, etc) introducing
a malaria vaccine in the wrong way could end up generating more deaths by
disrupting local immunity strategies. Here it becomes clear that lives can
be lost when first world scientific arrogance becomes an obstacle to applications
of local knowledge.

For his final case study Turnbull
presents his ethnographic research among turbulence researchers. Like Gilbert
and Mulkay’s work, this study tells us that the constructivist dilemma
is worse than we thought: not only are scientific truths the interpretive
result of heterogeneous networks, but the structure of the networks themselves
are open to interpretation. Some turbulence researchers seek canonical “structures”
(horseshoe vortices, striations, eddies, etc.), while others seek underlying
nonlinear equations. Some dismiss computer modeling as a minor tool, while
others see it as the only viable methodology. One simulator claims his data
is confirmed by an experimentalist, who in turn implies that the simulations
were fine-tuned to produce the desired outcome. Popper’s falsifiability
might work well if we could agree on what has been falsified, but what happens
when we can’t? This was a vivid demonstration of assemblage in high-tech
hard science.

The book ends with a brave attempt
to resuscitate the term “relativism.” Turnbull maintains that
STS researchers (SSK in particular) have unnecessarily allowed themselves
to be scared away from relativism; that we have succumbed to the epistemological
equivalent of red-baiting. He maintains that relativism need not be absolute:
“[o]n the contrary, the relativist can and does makes choices, judgments
and assessments about what to do and what to believe, but on the basis of
criteria that are flexible and negotiable” (pg. 221). It strikes me
as odd, however, that Turnbull is so willing to champion a kind of amended
relativism, with an ability to make occasional non-relative judgements, while
implying that the only alternative is an absolute rationalist positivism without
hope of redemption. Why insist on such an asymmetric and static division?
Couldn’t the fans of objectivity amend their universalism just as Turnbull
has done for relativism?

It would have been useful, I think,
for Turnbull to take more seriously his quotation of Haraway’s “god-trick,”
a critique she levels not only at rationalist positivism but at relativism
as well. If we are to replace the god trick with the trickster, then surely
there must be a motley assortment of strategies, not a single path of salvation.
Indeed, Turnbull’s familiar list of tricksters—Coyote in native
American cultures, Anasazi in west Africa, Loki in Scandanavia, etc.—is
starting to seem awfully tame for the wellsprings of uncertainity and disorder.
Shouldn’t a study devoted to the motley include rude and unwelcome tricksters
such as Mötley Crüe, a sleazy American metal band? OK, so they lack
any redeeming social value whatsoever, but why is it we can champion the rude
and obscene in indigenous cultures, yet are so reticent to do the same for
the subculture of white working class youth?

All kibitzing aside, Turnbull’s
book is a wonderful exploration of STS in the global age, and a well-documented
argument for the strong version of SSK. It is, overall, a strong contribution
to Dussel’s vision for the transmodern; that “third alternative”
which steers us between the Scylla of rationalism’s arrogance and the
Charybdis of deconstruction’s indecision. I highly recommend it.

References

Murry, Kevin. “Voices from
the top end.” The Age 17 December D8 (1996). Online at http://www.kitezh.com/texts/ntcomp.html